DEAD LETTER: A new book tells how Winston Churchill's war chiefs concocted "Capt. William Martin," complete with ID. The body was dumped at sea with misleading documents for the Germans to find. Photo: Getty Images

“Capt. William Martin” was dumped at sea with miselading documents for the Germans to find. (
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JANUARY 1943. In a tiny, tobacco-stained basement room beneath the Admiralty building in London, two men sat puzzling over a conundrum of their own devising: how to create a person from nothing, a man who had never been.

The younger man was tall and thin, with thick spectacles and an elaborate mustache, which he twiddled in concentration. The other, elegant and languid, was dressed in naval uniform and sucked on a curved pipe that fizzed and crackled evilly. The stuffy underground cavern lacked windows, natural light and ventilation. It had once been a wine cellar. Now it was home to Section 17M, a unit of the British intelligence service so secret that barely 20 people outside the room knew of its existence.

Room 13 of the Admiralty was a clearing house of secrets, lies and whispers. Every day the most lethal and valuable naval intelligence — decoded messages, deception plans, enemy movements, coded spy reports and other mysteries — poured into this little room, where they were analyzed, assessed and dispatched to distant parts of the world, the armor and ammunition of a secret war.

The two officers were also responsible for running agents and double agents, espionage and counterespionage, intelligence, fakery and fraud. They passed lies to the enemy that were false and damaging, as well as information that was true but harmless; they ran willing spies, reluctant spies pressed into service and spies who did not exist at all. Now, with the war at its height, they sought to create a spy who was different from any that had come before: a secret agent who was not only fictional, but dead.

The plan was the brainchild of one Charles Cholmondeley, a 25-year-old flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, seconded to the British secret service, MI5. Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumly”) was one of nature’s more notable eccentrics, but a most effective warrior in this strange and complicated war. His role was to imagine the unimaginable and try to lure the truth towards it.

On Oct. 31, 1942, Cholmondeley presented the Twenty Committee, the secret group overseeing the use of double agents, with a plan code-named “Trojan Horse”:

“A body is obtained from one of the London hospitals (normal peacetime price £10), it is then dressed in Army, Naval or Air Force uniform of suitable rank. The lungs are filled with water and the documents are disposed in an inside pocket. The body is then dropped by a Coastal Command aircraft at a suitable position where the set of the currents will probably carry the body ashore in enemy territory.”

Live agents or double agents could be tortured or turned. A dead body would never talk. The ideal spot to launch the body would be Spain, where pro-Nazi officials might pass the misleading documents to the Germans.

LT. CMDR. Ewen Montagu, the head of Section 17M, was assigned to help Cholmondeley to flesh out the idea. A brilliant barrister, Montagu’s organizational skills and mastery of detail perfectly complemented Cholmondeley’s “fertile brain.” This unlikely pair would develop into the most remarkable double act in the history of deception.

In January 1943, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed that after the successful North Africa campaign, the next target would be Sicily. The island was the logical place from which to deliver the gut punch into what Churchill called the soft “underbelly of the Axis.”

But if the strategic importance of Sicily was clear to the Allies, it was surely equally obvious to Italy and Germany. Churchill was blunt about the choice of target: “Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.” This presented the intelligence chiefs with a conundrum: how to convince the enemy that the Allies were not going to do what anyone with an atlas could see they ought to do.

The result was “Operation Barclay,” a complex, many-layered deception plan to convince the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece in the east, and the island of Sardinia, followed by southern France, in the west. The deception swung into action on a range of fronts, and Montagu and Cholmondeley went looking for a corpse.

World War II may have been responsible for the deaths of more people than any conflict in history, yet dead bodies of the right sort were surprisingly hard to find. What was needed was a discreet and helpful individual with legal access to plenty of fresh corpses.

Montagu knew just such a person: a coroner who went by the delightfully Dickensian name of Bentley Purchase. For a man who spent his life with the dead, Purchase was the life and soul of every occasion. He found death not only fascinating, but extremely funny. When Montagu dropped him a note asking if they might meet to discuss a confidential matter, Purchase replied with directions, and a typically jovial postscript: “An alternative means of getting here is, of course, to get run over.”

Purchase often wondered why people came to the capital to die and it “surprised him how many people seemed to be utterly friendless and unwanted when they arrived in his mortuary.”

On Jan. 26, a young Welshman was found in an abandoned warehouse in London and taken to St. Pancras Hospital, dying from the effects of rat poison. Glyndwr Michael was born in Aberbargoed, in the southern Welsh coal fields, on Jan. 4, 1909. His mother was Sarah Ann Chadwick. His father, a colliery hauler named Thomas Michael. They were unmarried. Sarah never learnt to read or write, or ever had any use for either skill.

At the outbreak of war, Michael was living with his mother, but a year later she was dead. Sarah had been his only emotional support. On January 16, 1940, Michael witnessed his mother’s death certificate, buried her alongside his father and disappeared. A country at war had little attention to spare for a man who was homeless, destitute and, most likely, mentally ill.

Michael probably ingested Battles Vermin Killer, a rat poison made from white phosphorus. He may have killed himself intentionally. But it is also possible that he ate food laced with poison and left in the warehouse, simply because he was hungry. At the age of 34, he had simply slipped through the cracks of a wartime society with other concerns: a single man, illegitimate and probably illiterate, without money, friends or family, he had died unloved and unlamented, but not unnoticed.

AS soon as the body of Michael reached St. Pancras morgue, Bentley Purchase informed Ewen Montagu that an ideal candidate for the project had arrived in his jurisdiction and would be “kept in suitable cold storage until we were ready for it.”

Before the operation could be formally launched, it needed a new code name. Churchill had a clear policy on choosing code words for major operations: “They ought not to be given names of a frivolous character” or names that in any way suggested the character of the operation. This rule was routinely ignored throughout the war, for spies found the temptation to invent joking and hinting titles for their most secret projects almost irresistible. Plan Trojan Horse became “Operation Mincemeat.”

The corpse would carry official letters to get across the core deception, but also handwritten personal letters, to convey personality. “The more real he appeared, the more convincing the whole affair would be,” reflected Montagu, since “every detail would be studied by the Germans.”

As if constructing a character in a novel, Montagu and Cholmondeley spent hour after hour in the Admiralty basement discussing and refining this imaginary person, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses. They gave him a middle name, a religion, a nicotine habit and a place of birth. They gave him a home town, rank, regiment, bank manager and cuff links. They gave him all the things that Glyndwr Michael had lacked in his luckless life, including a supportive family, money, friends, and love.

Michael became Capt. (acting Maj.) William “Bill” Martin of the Royal Marines, with identity card number 148228. The dead man was similar in build to Cholmondeley, but his clothes lacked the patina of wear, so the RAF officer climbed into the Marines uniform, and wore it for the next three months.

The man they conjured up was clever, even “brilliant,” and industrious, but forgetful, and inclined to the grand gesture. He liked a good time, enjoyed the theater and dancing, and spent more than he had, relying on his father to bail him out.

The first witness to Martin’s fictional character was his bank manager. Montagu approached Ernest Whitley Jones, joint general manager of Lloyd’s Bank, and asked him if he would be prepared to write an angry letter about an overdraft that did not exist, to a client who was also imaginary — a request that is surely unique in the annals of British banking. This was followed by a letter from John C. Martin, “a father of the old school” in Montagu’s words, and a bill for shirts.

While the larger themes of Martin’s life were being sketched out, Cholmondeley also began to gather the smaller items that a wartime officer might carry in his pockets: a book of stamps; a silver cross and St. Christopher’s medallion, a pencil stub, keys and a used bus ticket.

And yet something was missing. He had no love life. Bill Martin must be made to fall in love. In mid-February, the hunt began for a suitable mate. “The more attractive girls in our various offices” were asked to supply photographs for use in an identity parade. Montagu made a point of asking Jean Leslie, a young and attractive MI5 secretary, if she would oblige.

A few weeks earlier, Jean had gone swimming in the river at Wittenham Clumps with Tony, a Grenadier Guardsman on leave. Tony had taken a photograph, which he sent to her afterwards. In it, Jean has just emerged from the water, in a one-piece swimsuit, with towel held demurely, hair windswept, and a sweet grin on her face. In 1940s England, the image was not just attractive, but almost saucy, and both Jean Leslie and Montagu knew it.

Leslie’s photograph was added to the growing pile of Martin’s possessions, and a new character to the case: “Pam,” his fiancée, excitable, pretty and really quite dim. Here was a typical wartime romance: sudden, thrilling and, as matters would shortly turn out, doomed.

By early April, the plan was almost ready: all that was needed was final approval from above. On April 15, 1943, Colonel Johnnie Bevan, the officer in overall command of wartime deception, found himself sitting on Churchill’s bed and explaining Operation Mincemeat to a prime minister in his dressing gown. “To my surprise I was ushered into his bedroom in the annex where I found him in bed smoking a cigar.”

Churchill “took much interest” in the scheme, so much that Bevan felt obliged to point out that it could all go spectacularly wrong. The prime minister’s response was characteristically pithy. “In that case, we shall have to get the body back and give it another swim.”

The body of “Bill,” found by a Spanish fisherman, was reported to the Nazis, who sent reinforcements to Greece in response. A message to Churchill read: “Mincemeat swallowed whole.” The invasion of Sicily, on July 9, 1943, was a success.